MSNBC, along with virtually every cable news outlet, aired portions of Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference. That caught the ire of anchor Lawrence O’Donnell.
During The Last Word Thursday evening, the longtime host argued it was a mistake to air the speech as, in his opinion, it was filled with various inaccuracies and flat-out lies.
“It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie. Some of the networks tried to play catchup with fact-checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that, of course, is way too late and utterly useless,” said O’Donnell. “No network even attempted to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told. Every network has the capacity, especially with these wide screens we now have at home, to run a live scroll at the side of the screen fact-checking many of Donald Trump’s lies. Not all of them, that would be impossible, but many of them as he speaks.”
He then chastised MSNBC, as well as other cable networks, for failing to air comments made by Democratic nominee Kamala Harris at a Michigan rally, arguing that “they knew what time it was coming, they knew how to cover it live, and they didn’t after giving Donald Trump more than an hour of live coverage on all of their networks.”
Lawrence O’Donnell concluded by then blasting the cable news industry as a whole.
“It’s 2016 all over again. The same mistakes are being made. I have never seen an industry slower at learning from its own stupid mistakes than the American news business, and you cannot expect them in the next 89 days to figure out what they haven’t been able to figure out in nine years: how to cover a Trump for president campaign,” he stated.
